Upselling and cross-selling are the essential commercial strategies. They help ecommerce players discover optimal ways to become more profitable while offering higher client value. These approaches ultimately help get to know your customers better and eventually meet their needs more precisely with relevant offers, products, and services.
Defining Upselling vs Cross-Selling
The instances of using these terms interchangeably are quite common, however, we must outline right off the bat that cross-selling and upselling strategies are essentially different.
What is Upselling?
The main goals of upselling are to motivate customers to purchase premium versions of products and eventually increase the total gross revenue.
Example: you offer a customer a Pro or Ultimate or Premium plan instead of focusing their attention on the basic stuff.
What is Cross-Selling?
Cross-selling is about promoting extra products that relate to or somehow complement the products recently purchased by a certain customer.
Example: offering a memory card to a customer who’s about to buy a smartphone online.
Cross-Selling and Upselling Pro Tips
How to handle upsell and cross-sell most properly and efficiently? Let’s have a look at some field experience-backed pro tips our staff specialists have to share.
Focus on Customer Benefits
First things first, you need to focus all your efforts on making the lives of customers simpler and give them exactly what they need. This way, you show appreciation, which gives you a good chance to boost customer loyalty and achieve more sales.
That’s why any product you recommend should be relevant and meet customers’ needs. No recommendations just for the sake of making a huge sale.
You will be able to most efficiently upsell and cross-sell only to customers who feel valued and consider you a reputable products/services provider.
Which brings us directly to the next tip…
Use Customer Feedback to Your Advantage
In terms of both effective upselling and cross-selling strategies, the first step would be to learn from good-willed customer reviews and testimonials, as well as product case studies if you have any.
This brings several advantages and opportunities to the table:
- It is a great way to impact the level of potential customers’ initial trust and boost the chances of turning them into real buyers.
- You can analyze reviews and testimonials to define the products with the highest demand to upsell and cross-sell them to further customers.
- Upselling can be done while you are asking customers to leave reviews after the purchase, too.
People tend to express the biggest trust towards the opinions of others. Use this knowledge to be ever-so-convincing of your product’s quality and use.
Powerful Words Inspire and Motivate Customers
At the basic level of cross-selling and upselling strategies, your main objective should be achieving the efficient ability to stimulate excitement and confidence to buy in potential customers.
In this aspect, we have three practical recommendations:
- Spice up your text descriptions/messages/updates and any other pieces of text with exciting words like brand new, innovative, sensational, game-changing, mind-boggling, inspirational, exceptional, awesome, and so on. Emotional triggers can be also stimulated with announcements like “one-time offer”, “get an exclusive offer until it runs out,” etc.
- Collect the most relevant and powerful keywords and key phrases which can then be used to boost the efficiency of your initiatives to upsell and cross-sell. Use these 100 Powerful Marketing Words for inspiration
- Hire a copywriter who will help most harmoniously interweave the required keywords with the rest of the copy.
Find your points of impact with your own target audience of customers, stimulate their emotional responses, and create a sense of urgency where need be.
Adding the Related/Recommended Product(s) Section
You can add convenient boxes with related products to product pages that highlight more options. This simple approach may as well boost your profits by up to 30%, stimulating the customers’ interest and desire to get more cool stuff faster.
Again, if you run an online shop on Shopify, there are many themes and add-ons that help you easily integrate the box with related products on any page.
Use Email Marketing
Create an email newsletter to keep customers updated and excited while also informing them about new products and special offers. However, these should better be two separate newsletters.
Use your email marketing app to send a “warming up” newsletter addressed to subscribers and customers. This can re-engage them and encourage them to check out what you have to offer.
At the same time, you should also collect emails of potential customers and share offers with them. Email marketing is a very handy and efficient tool for promoting new offers among prospects so why not use it.
Use Upsell Software
You can pick from tons of upsell apps for the platform your online store is built on. For Shopify, for instance, there is a good selection of solutions for every minor and major upselling or cross-selling need.
These upsell apps include:
- Recom.ai Upsell & Cross-sell app helps to launch multiple cross-selling and upselling campaigns swiftly and effortlessly manage them using a rich toolset of flexible settings. With AI technology, the app offers the innovative Scout feature that automatically refines personalized product recommendations according to customer needs. Due to highly configurable display settings, you can show recommendations on any store page, like cart and checkout, to follow visitors along the sales funnel. Take advantage of ready-made widgets from the app’s library or customize them to match any store theme. A comprehensive analytics dashboard lets merchants keep track of their campaigns performance right from the app.
- Bold Upsell for enabling cross-sell pop-ups
- Upsell Recommendations for useful upselling tips
- Personalizer for individual, custom cataloging of products
- Frequently Bought Together for finding perfect product matches for customers
- Reconvert for adding upsell and cross-sell features to post-checkout and other pages of the store
If you explore the Shopify app store some more, you will definitely find much more useful stuff where that came from.
The Ultimate Benefits of Upselling and Cross-Selling
Companies and entrepreneurs commonly tend to combine upselling and cross-selling strategies in order to stay versatile in their marketing and brand loyalty boosting efforts. All in all, individual cross-selling and upselling strategies can help you significantly boost the overall success of your ecommerce.
Higher Average Order Value
Reportedly, regular cross-selling efforts bring Amazon 35% more profits, being a much more affordable alternative to buying leads, which in the long run saves the company costs and helps accumulate more sales faster.
Increase Orders From Regular Customers
You get almost a 70% chance of selling a product right away to a loyal customer who knows your brand firsthand as opposed to the 20% probability of selling to prospects, a study says.
Improved Customer Service
Upselling and cross-selling techniques will also help you smooth out the quality of service you deliver as you get to know your customers’ needs better.
Doing Upselling and Cross-Selling Right: The Bottom Line
Upselling and cross-selling are truly righteous approaches when it comes to real customer-focused ecommerce. If you want to adjust direct commercial interaction with your customers and boost conversion rates in the long run, you should definitely take heed of the above pro tips and start putting more effort into upselling and cross-selling initiatives.
Where to Find Products for Upselling and Cross-Selling?
You can boost your online store’s product selection without investing money in physical product inventory, with dropshipping. Syncee is a global B2B platform that has a huge directory of suppliers from all over the world, called Syncee Marketplace. Here you can have access to millions of high-profit products. The app takes care of the automated product data synchronization and order data flow.
About the Author:
Sara Johnson is a guest author at Syncee. She is a B2B digital marketing expert with a mission to help Shopify store owners to take their businesses to the next level. Her articles educate entrepreneurs on topics of ecommerce technology and marketing strategies. Her expertise comes from eight years of working with many ecommerce businesses.
Hungarian 
English